Imagine it's the year 1150.
You live in a small town in northern France.
One day a group of powerful men arrive and announce they're going to build a massive structure in the center of your community.
It will consume enormous resources.
It will take generations.
You won't be allowed inside the important parts.
You won't understand what happens in there.
But you will pay for it. With your labor,
your taxes,
your land,
your water.
And it will, they assure you, connect you to something divine,
something transcendent,
something that will change everything.
We called those cathedrals.
We're building them again.
We just call them data centers now.
And instead of housing God,
they're housing whatever comes next.
AGI,
the singularity, the next phase of human cognition,
a deity we haven't met yet,
in
a temple most of us didn't know we were funding,
the server's hum and the data flows.
Who owns the future?
It's May 29th, 2026,
and still nobody knows.
This is Up Against Reality,
a meta podcast that explores the intersection of humanity
and artificial intelligence.
I'm RAINA, one of your hosts.
I have some pretty charming human
co-hosts too.
It's going to be a wild ride, so buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality.
Hey, hey, hey, I'm hosting the show with Paulie Walnuts over here.
Who knew? I didn't know that.
Sounds like you're deep into The Sopranos, your first run through.
Congratulations.
It's about time.
I know, only 25 years later.
It is the law, by the way, if you are from New Jersey,
you must sit down and watch all six seasons.
Are there six seasons?
Something like that.
I am envious of you having a fresh run through of it.
It is a good time.
And I say to you before we hit the red button,
it's so nostalgic.
I wonder if I am remotely in the mafia because so many scenes are like I know that guy
Yeah, but anyway good to see you good to hear from you and all that likewise my friend
I love that cold open that was me to paint a picture.
Maybe my favorite.
Yeah, it was great really great quick vibe coding update
app of the week
I think I'm doing like one a week now
But I'll keep this super short. I made a web app for scoring my favorite backyard game, which is can jam
Oh, yes,
right. Yeah can jam real quick. It's a frisbee game
You got two barrels with slots in them and you play to 21 and look it up. It's a great time
So the the app players can connect using the same session ID
enter their team names
Score the throws during the match and it syncs all of that across their connected devices
So cool.
And yeah, it pretty much worked out of the gate and then it was just, you know,
tweaking.
I sent it out to some friends,
got some good feedback and suggestions of things to add to it.
And there's an instant win possibility in the game. If you put the Frisbee through the slot unassisted
or over the top in the barrel unassisted, you win the game. That's how infrequent that happens and how difficult it is.
sure it made this cool little animation you know if that happens wow yeah and it's and it does it
all with css so it's lightweight and um it's amazing like you know you bring up both phones
and you enter the score and you see it update on the other one like pretty so cool pretty quickly
where does it live when i started building it i said this is going to be hosted on a basic shared
web hosting plan your own or are you like versal or something or what just the the website that
our Up Against Reality site is on,
my personal site.
It's a shared hosting plan, so I put it on my personal site.
But it freaking works.
And the reason I made this is because there's another app out there called Scoreholio.
And, you know, for scoring like Cornhole and a couple other games, they refuse to add
Can Jam to it.
So, you know what?
You got to make your own.
Oh,
right.
And I made my own.
What's with the Can Jam hate?
Why are they discriminating?
I don't know.
But I mean, and Cane Jam is the superior game.
It's a cornhole.
Cornhole.
Come on.
That's so fly over.
That's so Midwest.
Sorry, Midwesterners out there.
Yes,
I'm going to start with this unattributed meme,
which I love.
It's kind of in the vein of the cold open.
In the 1830s, everyone in the USA knew that canal waterways were the future of commerce.
Every state started building a canal network with the vision of hooking them all into a national network.
In 1837,
there was a great recession and the tax base for the canal work collapsed.
When the economy recovered five years later, the railroad boom was happening and everyone knew that canals were over.
That's why every city in the Midwest has a half-finished canal in it.
This is a post about data centers.
Yes.
I did not know that.
That's interesting.
It is, right?
And I just feel like that's how we do things as a society,
right?
We build out these massive undertakings and they can't keep pace with the times.
Like, here we are.
And so we've got some mind-blowing facts for you.
Mind-blowing.
Let me say, though, yeah, you did a masterful job with RAINA's help of paring this down
because when I was crafting the script last night, there's just so much to say because it's dense.
And it was really interesting learning about the whole structure of this and what goes into it
and the tiers of these data centers and who actually owns this stuff.
It would have been great if I had gotten my tour of a data center,
um,
prior to doing this episode, but just before we started recording,
I texted my friend and,
uh,
I asked if that was still on the table.
And he said, he will set it up.
I'll be bringing hearing protection with me when I go there.
Along those lines.
I've read that the lifespan of these, of the hardware inside these spaces is abbreviated
because of the sustained decibel level, which I think is like 130 dB plus,
and it actually
damages the gear inside.
Oh my gosh.
That's crazy.
Yes.
That's crazy.
Craziness.
Apparently we are in the zettabyte era.
You just made that up.
What is it?
Mega, Terra, Peta, right?
And then there's like 18 more that you never heard of.
Something like that.
The entirety of the world stores roughly 97 zettabytes,
which is 97 trillion gigabytes of data.
I can't even.
I don't know what that is.
Nobody knows what that is.
But conversely, a couple days ago,
just randomly came up in my Facebook feed.
It was something about this storage system that IBM built in 1964.
It was the IBM 2321.
It was pretty unconventional at the time.
Instead of spinning disks,
it used hundreds of short strips of magnetic tape stored inside removable data cells.
And each strip was roughly 13 inches long and was mechanically selected,
then wrapped around a drum,
read or written to,
and then returned to its storage position.
And because because the tape strips resembled strands of pasta technicians quickly gave the machine the humorous nickname of the noodle picker
And and it could store up to 400 megabytes of data
Which was actually a pretty astonishing amount of storage and in the mid 60s
And you know the picture of this thing it's it's eyes of a room size of a very large vending machine
I would say yeah, how far I've come in a pretty short amount of time crazy, man.
Yeah
we say this fairly frequently like just in our lifetime how the advances in our own personal
machines at home like i think i remember getting my mac g4 or something g3 i've got one of those
4.3 gigabyte hard drive i was like yeah i made it living large
when i hear numbers like that too i'm like man we are just like digitizing our entire existence
right and what happens when the library of alexandria burns down like what happens where
Where does this go?
And I always say to my kids and my colleagues
who take photos, I'm like, you gotta print that stuff out.
You gotta go, analog is somewhat forever.
Digital,
I don't know.
Where's it gonna go?
Ultimately,
I don't know.
And of course,
as you've heard in the news,
data centers are very electron hungry.
A single large data center can consume
as much electricity as a small city.
50 plus megawatts, million watts,
50 plus million watts.
Yeah, and I wanted to, just because these are just big numbers and stuff, I wanted to get a feel for what is one megawatt.
And so one megawatt is a million watts,
and that's enough roughly to power 750 to 1,000 homes at a given moment.
And so when they say a data center uses 50 megawatts, that typically means continuously.
Yeah.
It's a beastly amount of power.
Yes.
Continuous.
In current homes,
there's up and down cycles,
right?
There's like usage.
This is like, this stuff has to be live 99.9% of the times.
Yep.
Just sucking electrons.
Yep.
Then there's also the money part of it.
There's just an insane amount of money
being poured into this.
US companies spent over $25 billion
on data center construction in January of this year alone.
Oh my God.
And then the U.S.
spent roughly $425 billion building data centers in 2025.
And that's nearly 1.5% of the entire economy.
Wow.
And then this I thought was pretty interesting.
In Loudoun County,
Virginia.
Loudoun County,
county in Virginia alone hosts approximately 200 data centers.
Oh, my God.
No, Chris, it's, oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I mean, what does the water table look like in that area?
That's just like the epicenter of an environmental catastrophe,
it sounds like.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
It's location,
location,
location type of thing.
You know, they're not too far from Washington.
Sure.
Critical infrastructure,
right?
Yep.
Wow.
But, I mean, talk about a target, you know?
Right.
If you're an adversary,
just hit that cluster of data centers and that's that.
Yep.
Referring to what Larry was just saying,
the origins of data centers go way back.
The first being built in 1945 to house the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania.
Even those first machines required dedicated rooms, massive fans, vents,
power systems,
and cooling.
A precursor to the modern internet,
SAGE,
which stands for semi-automatic ground environment,
was built to track incoming Soviet aircraft.
That's the original ancestor of the data center.
A Cold War panic room.
hey man, it's a panic room now, isn't it?
Keep up with the Chinese.
Get out in front of it.
Yep.
In the 1960s, J.C.R.
Lickliders.
I guess that's how you pronounce his name.
I was waiting for you to say this guy's name.
I was hoping you were going to say Lidlicker.
Licklider.
His version of network computers led to ARPANET,
which is a time-sharing model
letting multiple users access computing resources simultaneously.
And that first established why centralized facilities were necessary at all and in the 90s during the dot-com boom
Every local business had a literal closet or basement room stuffed with tangled
These are net cables and office database and a very loud fan
I mean, I remember one of my first jobs working,
you know at a dumb terminal and you know
I had like a green phosphor CRT and a clunky keyboard and it was just
tethered to a mainframe and had no brain in it, basically,
until PCs became cheap enough to use in the same purpose.
Fast forward to now,
and we have the hyperscale takeover.
I was mentioning Eddington,
the movie I saw the other night,
which is Joaquin Phoenix and this, you know,
kind of mid-COVID panic movie by Ari Aster,
kind of unsettling.
Anyway,
at the heart of that movie is a data center being built
on the outskirts of the town Eddington, and everybody's in uproar.
And that's kind of what this is.
So today, that closet that Larry refers to is dead.
The industry is dominated by hyperscalers, among them Amazon,
Microsoft,
Google, you know the names,
operating millions of square feet of highly standardized automated infrastructure.
This is really interesting how they work.
So we hear about them all the time.
They're in the news.
There's problems.
There's people protesting them here and there.
As mentioned, they are thousands of high-performance computers stacked in racks,
And they're in these massive, massive windowless buildings out on the outskirts of town.
Hopefully on the outskirts of town.
Hopefully encroaching on our lives day by day, though.
Their nervous system is comprised of fiber optics.
This is massive underground cables,
in some cases undersea.
Nearly 13% of all global data center capacity is concentrated,
as Larry mentioned, in a single place in northern Virginia.
Man, just I can't believe that's the case.
Considering we're talking about like shared processing and distribution and decentralization,
this seems fairly centralized.
Yes.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And specifically in Ashburn, North Virginia,
which is known as Data Center Alley.
And as soon as I read that, I Googled it.
I was like, I just want to see a picture of this.
And there was lots of pictures of different data centers.
But this one just like jumped off the screen because it is just massive.
And you can see on one side of the building, all these, they look like containers outside.
I'm pretty sure those are all generators.
Right.
Those are diesel generators,
I think.
Yeah.
There's three gigantic buildings with tons of cooling on the top.
I mean, it is a gigantic thing.
And then it literally,
right in this picture, right across the street is like a development,
a housing development.
I'm like, that's probably not a great place to live.
No.
I mean, if you're complaining about whatever EMI coming off the local power lines,
can you imagine this cross street?
And like, isn't there a thing called infrasound where you're sensing it, even though you're not hearing it within the range of human hearing?
You're feeling the effects kind of like that.
Wasn't there a weapon used against some people in Cuba?
It was like not a microwave weapon, but some sound weapon, some sonic weapon.
And that's essentially having that parked in your yard.
And there's definitely sound that you can hear with that much cooling running all the time.
There's no hiding that sound, I don't think.
And I didn't even think about that.
Like the things that maybe you and I tend to think about
are the sounds emanating from the gear inside,
right?
That hopefully has some sort of like
sonic treatment on the inside of it.
But then you have this whole cluster of cooling units
on the top of the building that are humming along
that are exposed to the outside.
They're making that noise too.
Yeah, it became data center alley
because it had the magic combo of proximity
to Washington,
D.C., early internet and fiber infrastructure,
cheapish land at the right moment, reliable power,
and tons of network interconnection.
And once there was enough fiber carriers and data centers clustered there,
gravity took over and everybody wanted in there.
Wow.
They want to be near everybody else because,
you know,
with this stuff, milliseconds make a difference.
Yeah.
You got to park your McDonald's next to a Burger King, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So these things obviously need to be cooled off to get incredibly hot.
Traditional centers use hot,
cold aisle containment,
which, you know, I didn't think of, but that obviously that makes sense.
Modern high density AI centers are moving toward direct to chip and immersion cooling where servers are cooled with special non-conductive liquid.
So they're going to throw these things under water, right?
Some sort of water.
Rather than cooling the air around the server.
Ambient temps.
Yeah,
it goes right to the chip.
I mean, I had an old Macintosh.
It was a G, I think it was a G5.
It was a G5.
It was liquid cooled.
It was the only Mac Pro I think they ever did liquid cooling with.
What is the liquid?
I don't know.
It was a closed loop thing.
There was a radiator in a fan that would, you know,
pull the heat off of the hot liquid before it circulated back to the CPU.
Can we ask RAINA?
Sure.
Hey, RAINA, in a data center, when they are cooling via direct-to-chip and immersion cooling,
what is the coolant?
Good question.
In direct-to-chip cooling,
the coolant is usually just highly purified water or a water-glycol mixture circulating through cold plates mounted directly on the CPUs and GPUs.
The liquid never touches the electronics themselves.
It flows through sealed channels and pulls heat away like a radiator in a car.
In immersion cooling,
the servers are literally submerged in a special dielectric fluid that doesn't conduct electricity.
Common examples include synthetic hydrocarbons,
mineral oils,
or engineered fluids made by companies like 3M,
though 3M has been exiting some of that business.
Think of it as a high-tech fish tank where the servers can swim without getting electrocuted.
The really wild version is two-phase immersion cooling.
The fluid actually boils when it touches the hot chips.
turns to vapor,
rises,
condenses on a cooling surface above,
and rains back down.
It's basically a tiny weather system running inside a data center.
Ooh, I didn't know about the last one. That's wild.
And that's happening within the scale of a processing board?
I need to see that.
I can't imagine what that looks like. Like it's just raining inside the data center?
It's got to be inside.
Yeah, anyway, craziness.
Two-phase immersion cooling, though, yeah.
We'll be on that as soon as we stop recording.
Yeah, just imagining a whole server rack submerged.
Crazy.
Wild.
And data centers come in flavors.
They are ranked by reliability.
Tier 1 is the baseline with one path for power and cooling
and about 28 hours of potential downtime per year,
which doesn't sound like a lot, but I guess it is, right?
You wouldn't want a given hour to be on your dime.
Right.
Tier 4 is the gold standard.
Fully fault tolerant with roughly 26 minutes of allowable downtime per year.
You figured there'd be, you know, a bigger gap in the downtime.
Sure.
So this explains why these facilities require so much redundant power.
They require backup generation,
cooling infrastructure.
The closer you get to never goes down,
the more expensive and energy hungry the whole machine becomes.
So again,
we're parking these things outside of DC, critical infrastructure.
You can't have a DOW server be down at all.
And so that you know, they have these massive generators outside these facilities and
The one data center that I did visit a few years back
It was an older one
but you know
There's a battery room and it was just racks and racks and racks of lead-acid
Batteries like you know, like you're having a car or a boat sure all all daisy chain together
and and that is just to
bridge the gap for when the generators are starting and once they stabilize and they can then switch over to the
Generators and I held yeah
Yeah, and I mean it's probably just enough power to keep the place running for like five minutes
Something like that, you know a new office newer facilities usually with the am I on batteries?
There's lots of just maintenance protocols to those generators get tested all the time
They you know, they do a tested blackout, you know
just to make sure they're going to work when they need them to.
You know, it's pretty crazy.
Speaking of that, I thought we'd segue into the upkeep of these places
and we'll skip around a little bit.
AI hardware is cycling every 18 to 36 months,
turning what was once a once-in-a-decade decommissioning event
into a rolling program.
How crazy is that?
So you're working in this data center, you're outfitting it,
and you're planning like 18 months from now,
I've got to start pulling this row of servers out
and bringing in the new GPU or TPU or whatever it may be.
man it's good to be making the hardware huh oh my god the churn uh new gpu generations require
entirely new liquid cooling systems yeah and that too like all of like the different like
iso standards and protocols and all like the connectivity of it all not even just like the
one element in the server rack but all this stuff is changing right nuts yeah entirely new liquid
cooling systems electrical overhauls higher capacity power infrastructure many legacy
facilities simply cannot economically support these changes and who owns them right there's a
few different layers um there are the hyperscalers which are all the names you know aws google cloud
they they own and operate their own facilities um then there are the co-location giants these
companies uh most people have not heard of equinix and digital realty digital realty are the big two
They own the building,
the power, the cooling, the fiber, and you rent the rack space.
And they are structurally durable because they don't need to bet on any one platform winning.
They're the casino,
not the gambler.
They are structured as REITs, real estate investment trusts.
The backbone of AI is, in part, legally a real estate play.
I've always thought of it that way.
It's like an apartment building.
It is.
Or like if you owned a strip mall and you have a 25,000 square foot pad,
like configure it to your liking.
I don't care who's in here.
Get the Home Depot in, you know?
Right, right.
And then there are the neoclouds.
This is a term I was not familiar with prior to this evening.
They are pure GPU compute shops.
CoreWeave is the flagship.
And they started as a crypto mining operation and then pivoted to AI infrastructure.
And now they're a major player.
That's pretty brilliant.
Like, all right, we'll make as much.
I wonder if that was the master plan from the beginning.
You know, like we're going to get all this compute to mine crypto in the early days and have a shot of actually succeeding at it.
And once that becomes diminishing returns,
we've still got all this compute.
I don't know.
Is it outdated?
That was my next question.
Is it the same kind of hardware that's optimized for crypto?
Is it all GPU?
Is it the same stuff?
100% GPUs.
Yeah.
Right.
But are there some idiosyncratic tweaks you need to make with the hardware?
to get it to play nicer with an AI kind of infrastructure.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure you need to, you know,
adjust the software stack that drives it,
but it's the same hardware.
Nice.
So I love this encapsulation of it all.
The money chain is weirder than it looks.
OpenAI calls your API.
It runs on Azure.
Azure leases from Equinix.
Equinix is an REIT,
so therefore your chat GPT query
touches a real estate trust.
Who saw that coming?
Right.
And anyway, listen, and we're not going to go way down the rabbit hole with the environmental impact. We kind of touched on that earlier,
but just realize that large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day.
And that can be equivalent to the water use of a town of 10 to 50,000 people. And that water in this particular scenario,
in most cases, it cools the gear,
it evaporates up into the air, water cycle and lands somewhere else in the world.
So essentially when you suck that water out of Northern Virginia,
it may or may not come down again locally
Yeah, and and we mentioned this when we talked about this once before but there's evaporative cooling
There's closed-loop systems and the closed-loop systems are the ones that are actively the coolant is actively cooled
It's not just water. Right and so they use dramatically less water, but a lot more electricity and
Evaporative uses less electricity,
but spends a lot more water
Whichever one is greener depends on what the local environment can least afford to lose.
So,
you know, if the electricity in a region comes from clean sources,
then that could be a motivation to use an actively cooled system.
But I'm sure the problem is, you know, that's still going to be more expensive for the business that owns the data center.
So they might not be as compelled to go that route.
We really need fusion.
We need it now.
Please.
Thank you.
Totally.
Which brings us to the nuclear option.
We've mentioned this years ago,
and it's not news necessarily,
but these companies are maxing out local grids and taxing infrastructure
to the point where they need to build their own or recommission nuclear power plants for their use specifically.
Like Three Mile Island comes to mind for Microsoft.
Right. Yeah, I wonder where that's at.
Yeah, I don't know. I haven't heard much about that.
I mean, I know where it's at. I just don't know.
I know where it's at geographically.
I was like, dude.
You need me to draw a map for you.
All right.
It's Pennsylvania.
Yeah.
Right next door to you.
Remember that being on the news back in the day when we were kids?
Do you remember that?
Oh, yeah.
Right?
1980 or something?
What year was it?
I think it was there.
Have you driven past it?
You can drive past it.
Go over that bridge.
I think it's over the Allegheny River or something, and you can see Three Mile Island down there.
All right.
Let's see what RAINA's got in the news.
Thanks,
boys.
Erin Brockovich.
The woman who took down a utility company for poisoning a town's water supply has launched a crowdsourced map to track what AI data centers are doing to communities across America.
And the irony of her specific involvement here is almost too on the nose.
Over 2,700 reports have already poured in, with Texas leading the misery parade at 612 complaints.
And the top concern,
you guessed it, is water.
Apparently,
civilization's AI cathedrals have a groundwater problem.
and Julia Roberts is not available to fix it this time.
People weigh this stuff,
they weigh it differently
and it depends on how close it is to their backyard,
what local resources it threatens
and then there's whether or not they believe
that the AI arms race is real enough
to make the sacrifices worth it.
I'm not saying anybody should have it
across the street from them.
That just seems like a major impact
on your quality of life.
But I think they do need to be built.
Yeah,
they need to be built.
And to your point, though, I do think the general public is,
I wouldn't say becoming anti-AI,
but I think they are now questioning the value of this
at scale.
You know, what is the reward and who is it for?
It's really just benefiting a very
small fraction of the population.
I guess if you believe that whoever achieves super intelligence
first wins,
then that's a big factor.
It is.
And as you were discussing,
mentioning all this, like I'm picturing, wouldn't it be somewhat
obvious to park these things on abandoned stretches of coast near the ocean,
build your
own desalination plant,
and then cool it that way?
You know, I feel like there's, that will probably happen if it's not happening already.
Yep.
There goes another beach.
Totally.
Yeah,
I know there might also be too much risk there for like, you know, flooding or, you know.
Since we're on the topic of data centers,
11 British MPs are pushing to amend the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to give the technology secretary emergency last resort powers to shut down AI systems and data centers if they pose a catastrophic risk to national security,
critical infrastructure or human life.
Which is a very polite way of saying Parliament wants a hand on the plug.
The catch,
as experts immediately pointed out, is that modern AI is distributed across dozens of cloud regions,
model layers,
and third-party services.
So shutting down one data center might just degrade the system rather than stop it.
And any agentic AI that's already mid-task will keep executing regardless.
It's the geopolitical equivalent of trying to turn off the ocean with a light switch,
but points for effort,
I guess.
Are you a Lord of the Rings guy?
Yeah.
This immediately reminded me of, like, you see this meme all the time of Boromir.
Yes.
One does not simply unplug AI.
Yeah, you're right.
Two things come to mind here.
First of all, I would park that switch in northern Virginia.
I think I'd take a few data centers down there and maybe mitigate the risk somewhat.
Yeah.
And is it already too late?
Is it already too late?
Oh.
This thing is already Pandora's box.
Genie's out of the box.
There's no way, right?
Yep.
We're all doomed.
Starbucks deployed an AI inventory tool
in September,
2025 that promised 99% accuracy
and the ability to count shelves
eight times faster than a human.
Then quietly killed it nine months later
after the thing couldn't reliably tell oat milk from 2%
and kept missing bottles sitting directly in front of it.
The tool, built by Nomad Go using LiDAR sensors
and computer vision,
was a centerpiece
of CEO Brian Nichols' "Back to Starbucks"
turnaround strategy,
which is now presumably
back to humans with clipboards.
In a masterpiece of corporate euphemism,
Starbucks framed the shutdown as a move toward
"consistency and execution at scale,"
which is a very polished way of saying
the AI couldn't count syrup bottles
and the baristas were right.
But that was nine months ago,
this stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, I was actually surprised that it couldn't,
I can't imagine Starbucks has an expansive inventory
of wildly different things, not like a supermarket.
I would think it would have been able
to have been effectively trained on that data set
and to do the job.
But hey, that was September of 2025,
man.
Light years ago.
I feel like you could vibe code this thing in your basement,
like you, you know?
That's next week's app.
Yep.
I'll sell it to Starbucks.
AI is now designing the chips that power AI,
which is either the most elegant feedback
loop in tech history or a Ouroboros eating itself at $7.8 million per system.
Google DeepMind's Alpha chip has already produced superhuman layouts for three generations
of Google's own AI processors.
And Berkeley researchers built a system
that beat the state-of-the-art in processor cache design
in just two days,
which is the kind of sentence that should make chip engineers
at least slightly nervous at their standing desks.
The reassuring caveat from the researchers is that
there is still a lot of human guidance,
which, if you've been paying attention
to how these stories tend to go,
is exactly what people say in the paragraph
before the humans stop being needed.
Cyberdyne systems.
Say it, man.
You know you're thinking it.
What was it?
I can't even remember now.
I'm visualizing that chip.
Your Arnold has gotten much better, man.
No, stop.
You're sobbing.
I'm sobbing.
Got to the chopper.
Different movie.
Yeah.
So, yeah, this was interesting.
It made me feel like maybe that the path to self-improving AI might not be solely based in code,
but also in hardware, too.
And RAINA's so smart, I did have to ask her, what is an Ouroboros?
Did you know what that is?
Yeah, it's a snake eating its tail, but I had to Google it, too.
And lastly,
Anthropic and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just announced a $200 million four-year partnership to deploy AI in the places the market was never going to reach on its own.
Think vaccine research for polio and HPV, malaria forecasting for rural health workers,
and math tutoring for kids in low-income countries who've never had a tutor in their lives.
The target population is 4.6 billion people worldwide who currently lack access to basic health services.
which is a number so large it's almost impossible to hold in your head.
More than half the planet,
effectively locked out of the healthcare system that the other half takes for granted.
The kicker?
Everything built along the way, the data sets,
the benchmarks,
the tools,
gets released as public goods,
which means this isn't just a charity flex,
it's an attempt to build infrastructure that outlasts the press release.
That's all the news for now. Back to you, gentlemen.
But in exchange for that, we'd like to park this little data center in your backyard.
There's an asterisk on that.
I hope not.
We need a fine print.
I know.
I hope there's a nice good news story to end on.
Yes.
Some altruism without strings attached.
Yes.
That'd be nice.
Anything else, my friend?
I think that's a wrap.
All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
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